Massacre Mafia Style (1974)

aka Duke Mitchell’s Like Father, Like Son

The somewhat unfortunately named Mimi Miceli (Duke Mitchell, of course) has spent much of his childhood in Sicily after his mafia don father had been driven out of New York. Now, a grown man of indeterminate age (because this is an epic, I suppose the very middle-aged Mitchell is supposed to be in his early twenties at the start of the movie, slowly aging towards his actual age), Mimi decides to follow his dream of moving to Los Angeles, making nice with the local mafia by ransoming a local Don (don’t ask me), and taking over black-owned pimp businesses by shooting a lot of pimps and prostitutes. And yes, you need to prepare for a lot of casual racism to make a viewer squirm in this one.

Things go rather well for Mimi and his best buddy Jolly (Vic Caesar) for some years. But eventually, his love for the overkill and his very selective respect for mafia traditions do lead to his retirement to the porn industry. Until his old colleagues get concerned about dear old Mimi there too.

This is the single movie nightclub singer, former comedian, singing voice of Fred Flintstone and part-time indie mafia movie auteur Duke Mitchell actually managed to finish in his life time, and having watched it after his posthumously finished Gone with the Pope, I’m really rather sad that these two are all the Mitchell movies I’ll ever get to witness in my lifetime. Not that this is the kind of film any mainstream viewer or film critic will ever call good, but it’s such a clear labour of love and such a singular and peculiar experience I’m certainly calling it good, despite the flaws that come to pass when a movie is made by the seat of someone’s somewhat shabby silk pants.

So yes, many of the actors – particularly those in one-scene roles – are wooden, but it’s the specific sort of woodenness arthouse filmmakers hiring non-actors to play people in their own professions or class so often get praised for. This really fits into one of the film’s great strengths, its ability to provide a viewer with the feeling one encounters a trashy, crass, but also semi-anthropological view into the lives of the entertainment and gangster working class in surroundings they really might have populated, showing tastes and styles they really might have had, written, directed and acted by a guy who actually knows the people he’s talking about first hand.

Adding to this particular element of the film’s equation are the scenes where Mitchell falls into long speeches about Italian American culture, the cultural importance of mothers, or bread-cutting rituals. These speeches are stiffly written and delivered with Mitchellian hyperbole and sentimentality, of course, but that only adds to the entertainment value as well as the film’s off-beat authenticity, Mitchell imagining himself into a Mafia philosopher who – like many a great philosopher - never practices what he preaches.

Given its somewhat epic scope at least when it comes to its supposed temporal and spacial dimensions, it is obvious that this is a bit of an answer to Coppola’s The Godfather (about which Mimi even goes on a bit of a rant) by people who are much closer to the real aesthetics and values driving the people both films talk about. Of course, Mitchell’s rather less plushy and a lot more crass and tawdry view of the mafia and their world wouldn’t have won any Academy Awards even if it hadn’t been made for pocket money that simply can’t buy the epicness Mitchell goes for. Obviously, both films aren’t documentaries but rather dreams and fantasies about the mafia; Mitchell’s fantasies simply come from a direction I suspect would be rather closer to the dreams of actual gangsters. Even the differences between the racist presentations of African Americans in Coppola’s and Mitchell’s films fit into that mould.

While all this sounds rather more interesting than actually exciting, what really gives the film an additional kick is its exploitational value, the abandon with which Mitchell cuts from one of the long, talky sequences to copious nudity and often preposterously entertaining violence. The editing (by Tony Mora and Robert Florio who really deserve to be mentioned here) becomes incredibly propulsive particularly in these transitions between quiet and loud scenes, as if this were Seattle a couple of decades later. It’s not just the editing, though. Even though his style of staging is sometimes a bit awkward, Mitchell the director is rather imaginative when it comes to the violence, giving a lot of it sardonically humorous edge without making it “ironic”. One can’t help but think he must have seen some of the early Italian post-Dirty Harry cop movies and watched them very closely indeed, because it is an air of wild abandon closer related to them than to much of US cinema (even in the grindhouse) that drives the action here.


Take all of this together, and Massacre Mafia Style becomes an unmissable piece of US low budget cinema everyone with even the slightest interest in this sort of thing should see.

In short: Gone with the Pope (197x/2010)

After coming out of prison and doing a bit of professional killing for the mob, sad and sleazy gangster Paul (Duke Mitchell), unwilling to live off his rich girlfriend, decides to grab his three best buddies with equally bible appropriate first names from prison and go on a boating trip with them on said girlfriend’s yacht to make them and him feel better. Well, that’s what he tells them and his girlfriend. In reality, Paul has decided they are going to kidnap the Pope (Lorenzo Dardado) and ransom him for the tidy sum of one dollar from every Catholic in the world. Paul does let himself talk down from that last bit, though, and only goes for 50 cents pC (that’s the official acronym) in the end.

The popenapping goes through without a hitch. But with the Pope come problems. Namely, despite some awkward (yet very funny) rants by Paul about the old theological chestnut of the absence of god in the face of evil, the holy dude conquers his friends’ hearts, and basically adopts them, so that Paul has to let everyone go be holy and sails off into the sunset himself alone. The rousing spiritual bit is followed by a bit more violence, sex, and some glowing Catholic iconography in the film’s meaningful end.

Shot in the mid-70’s by writer/director/star and producer Duke Mitchell, this pretty bizarre and damn brilliant piece of cinematic strangeness was only finished long after Mitchell’s death, based on a work print, the negatives and Mitchell’s notes, which has been quite the service to mankind. The very best thing about the film as it now stands is how little it feels like anyone involved in its post-production is treating it ironically. Instead, they are clearly trying to realize Mitchell’s vision with all the respect it is due.

Well, one could argue with much more respect than it is actually due, but that would make one a bit boring as well as a heartless bastard, so I’m not going to. As it stands, said vision is certainly pretty singular, answering the call of mid-70s high profile mafia movies with a mixture of sleaze and exploitational values, theological concerns expressed with the sort of wide-eyed naivety you wouldn’t expect from a guy who looks – well, indeed was – an over the hill night club act, through scenes of hetero men buddying up rather more physically than you ever get to see around where I live, and being pulled back to Earth via some gob-smacking casual racism.


While acting and production values are certainly on the dubious side – though only ever boring in about the first five minutes of boring mafia table talk – there’s also a beguiling sense of authenticity to them. Sure, my brain told me, these guys can’t actually act, and this dialogue is absurd (though again, never boring), but boy, do I believe this is more like actual mid-70s gangsters acted, looked and felt like anyone in The Godfather, and looks much more like the world of shady bars and hotel rooms they lived in. It’s an astonishing film.